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Getting a Gas Turbine
Introduction So perhaps you have heard of the Extractor's amazing, compact 5x ore processing. Or maybe you want to be able to do things insanely fast and heard RotaryCraft can do lots of things at 1 tick/operation. Or maybe you've gone through this mod enough times in many different worlds that you don't want to think about the logistics of climbing up the tech tree again. This page will guide you all the way up to the Gas Turbine, using only things native to RotaryCraft. Note that this guide is meant to be simple and easy to follow. As such, almost all of the designs presented here have more efficient setups which have been eschewed in favor of simplicity. It also doesn't use many mid-tier engines, making most machinery very slow until the end. Getting Started To start, craft a Screwdriver (required to rotate machines and change gearbox modes) and an Angular Transducer (useful for checking how much shaft power is being transmitted between places). Craft a Blast Furnace, place it next to some lava, and wait for it to heat up. This is how you make steel from sand, gunpowder, coal, and iron ingots. First place just the coal in the middle slots to produce coal coke, which is a more efficient furnace fuel and (more importantly) will sometimes give you bonus HSLA Steel ingots. Now, fill all the middle slots with iron ingots and place the sand, coal coke, and gunpowder in the left slots. Now you have some steel ingots! Next make a Worktable, which is the crafting station you will be making most of your components in. Take a break now and read the page on Understanding Power Requirements as it is crucial to understand what you're doing with this mod. The rest of this guide assumes you know how to configure gearboxes and shaft junctions with the screwdriver. Your First Engine You could start with a DC Electric Engine (1 kW, 4 Nm, 256 rad/s) but honestly you should just jump to a Steam Engine (16kW, 32Nm, 512 rad/s) right away. While you're at it, get your hands on some Netherrack if you want things to be a bit easier. Don't heat up the engine yet. The key to making this setup self-sufficient is to split the power so that the steam engine runs its own water supply. Take half the power and direct it to a pump that sits over a pool of water (at least 3x3), then connect the pump to the back of the steam engine. Now that that's connected, manually put a few buckets of water in the engine before heating it up. Dig under two blocks under the engine, place the Netherrack down, and start a permanent fire under the engine to heat it up. Heating with lava is a bit tougher because it can overheat the engine, but crafting a few Heat Fins and attaching them to the engine will solve that problem. Your steam engine should now be running, producing 8 kW (16 Nm @ 512 rad/s) out the other end of the shaft junction. For comparison to other mods, using a Rotational Dynamo to produce RF will give you a continuous 15 RF/t from half the Steam Engine's power. Not worth it, right? Let's keep going. Lubricant Set up a farm for canola seeds and craft a Grinder. This will be how you get lubricant for your later gearboxes. A nice bonus of this setup is that the grinder can be used to turn ores into 3 flakes each, which are smeltable into ingots. This is where the reality of the shaft power system comes in. You've got 8 kW (16 Nm @ 512 rad/s) from the Steam Engine but need it to be 128 Nm to run the Grinder. Make a few heat fins and a 8x Wooden gearbox. Run your shaft power through the gearbox set to Torque mode and attach the fins to the gearbox to produce 128 Nm @ 64 rad/s, which will run the Grinder. Grind up some canola seeds to produce lubricant. Why the wooden gearbox? All the later gearboxes either require lubricant or are uncraftable to you right now, and wooden gearboxes actually don't get damaged as long as you cool them. It looks odd, but it works for a set-it-and-forget-it setup at low power. If you're clever, you can run the water supply, the grinder, and a furnace heated by a Friction Heater all from the same engine. Add a few things to transport items and you now have a simple (albeit slow) automatic 3x ore processing setup. This is left as an exercise to the reader. Ethanol Production The next step up the tech tree is the Gasoline Engine which produces 65 kW (128 Nm @ 512 rad/s). To run it, you need a Fermenter, water, and 1 kW (min. 32 rad/s) of power to produce ethanol crystals. The preferred way would be to make another Steam Engine and run it off of the same water supply you built earlier, as you can easily pipe the water to both of them at once and have some more shaft power to work with if you split it with a junction. Producing Ethanol crystals is a 3-step process: * Sugar in the top slot and dirt in the bottom produces yeast (note you can get 3 sugar per sugar cane in the grinder) * Yeast on the top and saplings/leaves on the bottom produces sludge * Smelting sludge in a Furnace yields ethanol crystals Each crystal will run the gasoline engine for a minute. Through a rotational dynamo, this is 126 RF/t for a total of 151.2 kRF/crystal. But wait, there's more... Starting up the Extractor With the appropriate gearboxes, a gasoline engine can run an Extractor by itself! The simplest setup is the engine running its shaft power through a 16x Steel gearbox, which will run stages 1 and 4 on torque mode and stages 2 and 3 on speed mode. Don't forget the extractor also needs water for the middle stages, so you might want to put it near your steam engine setup. But you're looking at about 40 seconds per ingot if you use this basic setup. Consider upgrading this part of your machinery once you have better power generation. You'll need tungsten ingots for the Gas Turbine, which are only produced as a byproduct of processing iron ore in the extractor. Each requires 8 ingots, which will on average take 118 iron ore. Better get mining... Skipping a few steps... Our next step in power generation is the Microturbine which produces 2 MW (16 Nm @ 131krad/s), as it is the simplest next step and shares a lot of what's needed for a Gas Turbine. As for why the everything in between was skipped: * The AC Electric Engine requires a Magnetizing Unit which, for the purpose of this guide, has no other use. 2 gasoline engines provide the same power as one of them anyway. * The Performance Engine requires aluminium alloy ingots, but once you have those you're most of the way to microturbines. * The Hydrokinetic Engine requires almost 1 MW to produce the spring steel ingots it needs in a blast furnace, which is impractical to produce without microturbines (altough it can be replaced by 4 Performance Engines, you don't even need a gearbox and it gives nearly 1200°C or more) or a fair bit of other infrastructure built up. It also requires more lubricant than a steam engine-powered grinder can continuously supply. That being said, they are great engines to use for various farming/processing machines. But that's not our goal here. Jet Fuel To run the turbine-based engines, you need jet fuel. To make it, you need to make a Fractionation Unit and power it with 65kW (min. 8krad/s). Luckily, your gasoline engine provides just enough power! It's not fast enough though, so give it a 16x gearbox set to speed. You can use a stone gearbox if you want to, but make sure to cool it with heat fins or else it will get damaged. The ingredients mostly come from the Nether as blocks (grind up netherrack and soul sand) or drops (kill some blazes, magma cubes, and a ghast). You probably already have lots of coal and hopefully you made lots of extra ethanol crystals. Each ingredient only has a chance to be used up, so you can get quite a bit of fuel out of a handful of items. A full stack of ingredients will produce a few hundred buckets of fuel. That'll run a microturbine for the better part of a day or a gas turbine for about half an hour. Another Furnace? Now we need to make some inductive metal ingots. First, craft together some gold flakes (from your extractor) and redstone to make some powder. Now we need to turn them into ingots in a Pulse Jet Furnace, which requires some Jet Fuel and very fast shaft power. It also needs to be cooled, either with water or many cooling fins! How fast? 131 krad/s is what we'll need. Shaft power won't transfer if less than 1 Nm or 1 rad/s, which means effectively we need 131 kW of power. Craft another gasoline engine and join it with your other one in a shaft junction to produce 131 kW @ 512 rad/s. Run it through a 16x gearbox (stone or better) set to speed, followed by another 16x gearbox made of diamond to produce the 131 krad/s you need. The ordering of the gearboxes is important. The first step up is still moderately slow, but the second will end at (obviously) 131 krad/s, which only diamond can handle. There are better gearboxes but you can't craft them yet. Anyway, turn those inductive metal blends into inductive metal ingots. The funny thing about Aluminium RotaryCraft adds aluminium in the form of powder as a byproduct from processing lapis ore and redstone ore in the extractor. However so many other mods add aluminium as well that there's a high likelihood that you can just skip this whole part, right? Wrong! Turns out you can't substitute other aluminium for these recipes. That's fine, this guide is again intended to be RotaryCraft-only. First step here is to make silicon powder in a blast furnace at 700 C. Lava only heats to 600 C, so you'll need a Friction Heater to get it to 700 C. Luckily, a gasoline engine without any gearboxes will get you to 786 C. The recipe requires sand, aluminium powder, and blaze powder. Next step is to make the aluminium alloy powder, which requires the above silicon powder and aluminium ingots. Ingots can be substituted from other mods' aluminium, but the RotaryCraft powder smelts into ingots if that's not an option. The tricky part is that it requires 900 C. Two gasoline engines combined with a shaft junction will get you to 894 C, which almost seems like a joke... unless you realize that they can be conveniently combined along with a steam engine to bring you up to 912 C. Great! Do that. Almost there! Now to make a Microturbine and Gas Turbine, we're going to need to make a High-Temperature Combustor, which can only be created in a Blast Furnace heated up to 1100 C. Take the Aluminium Alloy ingots you just made, and make yourself 2 Performance Engines (or Performance Engine upgrades for your Gasoline engines). This should be enough to heat up your Blast Furnace to 1110 C. Using an Industrial Coil, you can also optionally set the torque and speed required to heat the Blast Furnace to 1150 C, to make Spring Steel for the Hydrokinetic Engines. Now we have all the ingredients to make a Microturbine, which will produce 2 MW (16 Nm @ 131 krad/s) of power. For those of you keeping score at home, this is 4032 RF/t with the right gearboxes. The last thing we need is tungsten ingots. Notice how the tungsten you got from the extractor is in flakes... and that you can't just smelt it for ingots? That's because in real life tungsten has an extremely high melting point, which RotaryCraft has decided to emulate. To make the tungsten ingots, you need to sinter the flakes in a furnace at high temperature. This makes the flakes stick together without melting via a process very similar to what makes chunks of ice stick together inside a drink. But I digress. You need to heat a furnace to 1350 C with a friction heater, which is a temperature you can get to with a microturbine as long as you have the right gearboxes. Take the 16x diamond gearbox you made earlier for the pulse jet furnace and run the microturbine's shaft power through it (set to torque). Now you need another 4x or 8x gearbox after that made of steel or better, then you can place the friction heater. If all goes well, you should now have your tungsten ingots to build your gas turbine! Entity-eating Monster You can craft your Gas Turbine and all, but there's something I haven't really mentioned throughout this guide. Many machines in RotaryCraft are dangerous if misused, and the Gas Turbine is particularly bad. First off, it will suck in anything behind it that isn't a solid block and, if it's a living thing, almost certainly kill it. If that living thing happens to be larger than a chicken, the engine will be damaged and need repair with a turbine (costing 35 steel or so). What's worse is that if you keep running a damaged gas turbine, it will eventually explode. If it does that, you'll lose all the fuel inside of it, a hundred or so steel, and more importantly the 8 tungsten ingots you used to craft it and any machines around the turbine. Now that that's out of the way, it's time to celebrate! 67MW (1 kNM @ 65 krad/s) of power is nothing to scoff at. If you really insist on turning this into RF, you will need a minimum of 8 rotational dynamos (4 if upgraded with flux amplitude upgrades) due to power limitations. When all is said and done, you'll be getting 129 kRF/t from the turbine. Also, have fun fueling it. One bucket lasts 10 seconds and the turbine itself takes a bit over 10 buckets to come up to max speed. Even better, it will consume fuel more twice as fast during the spin-up time. Now what? With some cleverness with shaft junctions and gearboxes, you can do all of these with a single Gas Turbine: * 16 MW: Process ore with an Extractor at nearly max speed (effectively a bit under 2 ticks per operation) * 16 MW: Use a Chunk Loader to keep your base loaded... as well as everything around it within render distance (not recommended for servers) * 12 MW: Defend your base with a Laser Gun... and a RailGun * 9 MW: Have 9 Spawner Controller spawning mobs every tick * 4 MW: Upgrade your Grinder from "really, really slow" to max speed * 4 MW: Power a Bedrock Breaker (2 dust every 5 minutes or so) * 1 MW: Run a Centrifuge at max speed to process all those canola seed husks you've accumulated * 1 MW: Use a Magnetizing Unit at max speed (this will magnetize the conversion engine upgrades within 36 seconds) * 1 MW: Produce Jet Fuel in a Fractionation Unit at max speed But that's just an example. You can, of course, generate 129 kRF/t in a very dangerous way, but then why are you using this mod for RF? And if you really want overpowered, you now have most of the infrastructure necessary to start ReactorCraft. An entry-level reactor will net you close to 1 GW of power (~1.6 MRF/t). Footnote If you've never used RotaryCraft before and made it through this guide, I congratulate you. Although in my opinion, you're missing out on a lot of what the mod has to offer. You should go back and toy around with everything else if you haven't already, but in "easy mode" since you have most of the important machines for the mod built up now. Reika has often said he hates people single-mindedly diving into RotaryCraft for the specific purpose of getting a working Extractor system or Bedrock tools. While most of the gating in RotaryCraft lies in the power generation, the proposed initial Extractor setup is deliberately sub-optimal and the proper way to feed 16 MW into it for 1-tick speed is left as an exercise to the reader (ha!). A bedrock breaker is certainly runnable with a gas turbine, but not without gearboxes; my hope is that by the time a reader gets to the end of this guide, they understand the shaft power system well enough to figure that out themselves and maybe have a better appreciation for the mod overall. However, this guide does give a bare-bones approach to the power progression and how to get to the top of it. Hopefully the existence of this guide doesn't go against his wishes.